Microplastics in Terrestrial Ecosystems: A Scientometric Analysis

Donghui He,Hailong He,Keith Bristow,Vilim Filipović,Jialong Lv

doi:10.3390/su12208739

Abstract

Microplastics, as an emerging contaminant, have been shown to threaten the sustainability of ecosystems, and there is also concern about human exposure, as microplastic particles tend to bioaccumulate and biomagnify through the food chain. While microplastics in marine environments have been extensively studied, research on microplastics in terrestrial ecosystems is just starting to gain momentum. In this paper, we used scientometric analysis to understand the current status of microplastic research in terrestrial systems. The global scientific literature on microplastics in terrestrial ecosystems, based on data from the Web of Science between 1986 and 2020, was explored with the VOSviewer scientometric software. Co-occurrence visualization maps and citation analysis were used to identify the relationship among keywords, authors, organizations, countries, and journals focusing on the issues of terrestrial microplastics. The results show that research on microplastics in terrestrial systems just started in the past few years but is increasing rapidly. Science of the Total Environment ranks first among the journals publishing papers on terrestrial microplastics. In addition, we also highlighted the desire to establish standards/protocols for extracting and quantifying microplastics in soils. Future studies are recommended to fill the knowledge gaps on the abundance, distribution, ecological and economic effects, and toxicity of microplastics.

Highlights

Over 426 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic products were produced globally in 2018, including 359 Mt of resins, according to PlasticsEurope, and 67 Mt of synthetic fibers, according to The Fiber Year
The search returned a total of 877 publications pertaining to microplastics in the terrestrial ecosystem
The number of publications on terrestrial microplastics was small compared with the 2882 publications that were focused on microplastics in the marine ecosystem, which was searched with query sets of “TS = ((microplastic* OR nanoplastic*) AND) AND PY = (1985–2020)” in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) following an approach similar to that of Pauna et al [18]

Summary

Introduction

Over 426 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic products were produced globally in 2018, including 359 Mt of resins, according to PlasticsEurope, and 67 Mt of synthetic fibers, according to The Fiber Year. Small microplastics have become a big issue drawing global concern [8]. Because they adsorb pollutants or other chemical substances on their surface, microplastics can be ingested by biota and accumulate in the food chain [8,9,10,11,12]. Great efforts have been devoted to studying their occurrence, adverse ecological effects, and toxicity in the marine ecosystem and coastal environment or on shorelines [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion